Books

Courtesy of the orangegirl:

1 Total number of books in your house:

I own two bookshelves and they’re set at opposite ends my apartment. One is filled with books on architecture and holds a corner of my bedroom (250 books). The other has a bit of everything else and is on public view in my living room (100 books). So only those closest to me see the schizophrenically lopsided weight of my collection. Then there are the Japanese books under my bed, naughty books on a shelf nearby, cookbooks in the kitchen, and general and software reference books on my desk.


2 The last book you bought was:

McSweeney’s, no. 8. Since coming to Boston I’ve browsed the Harvard Bookstore each year on Patriot’s Day and then read my selection while watching the Marathon in some suburb west of Boston. Last year it was Narcissus and Goldmund (my least favorite of Hesse’s work).


3 The last book you finished was:

McSweeney’s, no. 8.
Or to be digital, even more recently I listened to Sarah Vowell’s Partly Cloudy Patriot as an MP3 after hearing her speak at the Ford Forum at Northeastern last month. Thanks to orangegirl for arguing its merits . Other recent reads include Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, McSweeney’s no. 14, The War of the End of the World. The last is a slow but engrossing story of a group of religious zealots and revolutionaries who tried to establish a City of God in northern Brazil at the turn of the century.

And a more interesting question is really the books that you have not finished but keep returning to: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, The Details of Modern Architecture (Volume 1 and 2), Don Quixote.


4 Five books you often read or that mean a lot to you:

I never have easy answers to the “favorite” questions. When I finish this post I will have remembered ten more books that meant something to me but remained just out of reach while writing this. But here’s an attempt:
Remembrance of Things Past battles with The Satanic Verses as having the most captivating openings of anything I’ve read (A description of falling asleep in one and an introduction to the central characters as they plummet through the sky in the other).
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. It’s a fable about New York City, love, redemption. I have a soft spot for the romantic and the fantastic and this book is both while also being the most exaggeratingly virtuosic display of language I’ve read. I fell in love with this book and its author, though my ardor has cooled since learning Helprin was a speech writer for Bob Dole. If his philosophy is examined too closely its morals are beautiful but untenable and cruel.
Not unlike that of Ayn Rand. As a young man I loved Atlas Shrugged—as a great story rather than ideological text. I plowed through its nine hundred pages with gusto (and yes, I have read but will not comment on The Fountainhead).

And since most of my book are on architecture, here are books that I think are incredible and which I hope might also appeal to non-architects:
Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas is storytelling at its best. He uncovers a New York that surprises but makes so much sense.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino might inspire architecture if only through its faith that metaphor can be captured in stone. (I loaned my copy of this book to a woman I met online and with whom I was briefly but intensely infatuated. She read the book, dropped me, and proceeded to add Invisible Cities to her list of favorite books on her personals profile. That and the fact that I never got the book back still hurts.)
Architecture and Disjunction by Bernard Tschumi. It has the recommendation that we might look for opportunities to “pole vault in cathedrals”. Not simply an advocation for the reuse of buildings in interesting ways, but an image with such humor and hope about architecture and cities. It is something I want to see someday.

5 Who you're going to pass this along to and why:

I don’t follow many blogs, but I’ll answer this as as I do some research.
Yes, I'll send this to Katharine as a bit of energy for her blog. Visit her blog, there are words and poetry there.